Book I. Inside Underground Writing: Two Zine Fests, a Hootenanny, and a Side-Trip To Paradise Garden, with a Death in the Family, in Between. June 28 to August 2. 50,000 words. An account of the month Brenda and I went Hurricane Dennis evac to Tallahassee; I wrote an essay on my thoughts about the creative writing program industry; my first book in 17 years, Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family, came out, published by LitVision Press; I traveled to a zine fest in Philadelphia promoting Bukowski Never Did This and giving a workshop on DIY publishing; my mother died, and I flew to Seattle, where I delivered the eulogy at her funeral; I saw that "Inside Underground Writing" is the first part of a three-part book, BARNSTORMING FOR POETRY: THREE MONTHS IN THE LIFE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST WRITER AND HIS FRIENDS; Brenda and I drove to Atlanta for Zine-A-Polooza 2005, where I was on a panel on Marketing, Promotion, and Distribution and I was interviewed for a short documentary on the underground zine, comics, and indy-prod music scene; we went by the Everett Brothers Music Barn, in Suwanee, to see Owen play fiddle with David Davis and the Warrior River Boys; we stayed with our neighbor Jodi and her mother Meggie and her sister Lisa in Dahlonega (Jodi and Meggie went to Everett's Barn with us); we went by Paradise Garden on the way home, where the chairman and chaplain of the foundation to renovate the park, Rev. Col. Tommy Littleton, met us, let us in, and gave us a tour. As I was on the road so much, the book contains a lot of poems, journal entries, prose vignettes, and letters to people about the logistics of a career as an underground writer: how to get from here to there on a shoestring budget. You deal in herds of cattle, as Thoreau said. However, anything you have to do, as Rahsaan Roland Kirk said, you have to go on and do yourself. Or, as William S. Burroughs told Jesse Bernstein, "Keep it in the family. Stick with your friends." Also, you see the book take shape, as it finds its keel, tacks, and take off up Harrison Avenue like a new sheet of canvas, tearing, or the fart of a fisherman who was becalmed in the horse latitudes and had to eat dried beans for two weeks.
Book II. Underground Writer: A Life Outside the Mainstream. August 2 to September 30. In progress. A memoir. Written concurrently with "Journal of a Memoir."
Book III. Journal of a Memoir. August 2 to September 30. In progress. Written concurrently with "Underground Writer: A Life Outside the Mainstream." Writing a memoir and a journal of a memoir isn't new, but posting them on the worldwide web, daily, as you write them, is. So fresh it smokes, as Uncle Warren said of the turkey shit.
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(1) Short for "America's greatest living unpublished,
or underpublished writer, perhaps the greatest unpublished, or underpublished American
writer ever."